THE NEW YORKER moved by force; the weather, the moon, and the tides were about right. (It turned out that all the talk of an am- phibious landing on Kuwait was a feint. ) Also, some of our Arab allies ( as well as the French) were arguing that the continued bombing of Iraq was causing anger to rise in the region, so best to get the whole thing over with soon. The Saudis wanted the war over before Ramadan, the monthlong reli- gious fasting period that begins in mid- March-not, as many had thought, because they would be offended by fighting during that holiday (Arabs had started the 1973 Yom Kippur war during Ramadan) but because of the sensitivities that would be stirred by their having to help feed a half million foreign troops at that time, and because Saudi leaders thought that Ramadan would be a propitious time to get every- one to calm down after the war. Though it seems hard to remember now, Bush actually began the ground war against substantial political resis- tance. A number of key members of Congress, in both parties, had publicly and privately urged that he continue the air war without bringing the ground troops into it-at least for some time. When Schwarzkopf said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, on February 19th, that the Iraqi troops were "on the verge of collapse," a number of people here took that as evidence that there need be no ground war, except, perhaps, as a mopping-up exercise. Though that's close to what the ground war turned out to be, Con- gress had no way of foreseeing that. One senior Pentagon official said to me later that Schwarzkopf "got a little carried away," and in the official briefings here stressed that, as Lieuten- ant General Thomas Kelly put it a week ago Wednesday, "it's not going to be a snap." Actually, the field com- manders couldn't know how strong an Iraqi force they would encounter until they actually encountered it, and all along the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates of the damage to Iraqi forces had been more conservative than those of the field commanders. But Schwarz- kopf was closer to the truth. T HOVGH Administration offi- cials, starting with the President, said that they "appreciated" the Soviet efforts, before the ground war began, to negotiate an end to the war, they weren't at all appreciative. There was, however, a difference of view within the Administration; some State De- partment officials were more interested in seeing whether anything could be made of the Soviet negotiations with Iraq than were their counterparts on the staff of the National Security Council or Cheney. (Washington loves splits between the N .S.C. and the State Department, and last week's sudden spate of stories saying that Brent Scowcroft, the national-security advis- er, and his deputy, Robert Gates, had gained the upper hand on Gulf and Soviet policy from James Baker, the Secretary of State and close friend of the President, set off a fair amount of gossip here. These two men, joined by Cheney and Vice-President Dan Quayle, had been more hawkish than Baker through much of the Gulf crisis, and take a more skeptical view of the Soviet V nion. Baker had once sup- pressed a skeptical speech by Gates. There had been enough incidents-an earlier press story portraying Baker as the restraining hand on Bush in Gulf policy, the mysterious joint V nited States-Soviet V nion statement on end- ing the Gulf war, an unusual public row between Baker and the Israeli Ambassador here, into which Baker, overriding the judgment of certain White House officials, dragged the President-to spawn some attacks on Baker by his antagonists through the press. There was some speculation that potential rivalries in 1992, or 1996, were at play here. Whatever the Presi- dent really thought-he was said by an adviser to be "very upset" about the stories-he quite visibly took Baker off with him to Camp David last week- end. ) In any event, on Tuesday, February 19th, the President, with the full agreement of most of his key coalition allies, dismissed the first Soviet propos- al, saying, "It falls well short of what would be required." The proposal, 85 which wasn't made public, was deemed too vague, since it lacked timetables and deadlines, and it stated that the Soviet V nion would try to guarantee the se- curity of Hussein and the territorial integrity of Iraq-but maintaining Saddam Hussein in power was exactly what we didn't want. A senior Admin- istration official said to me at the time, "The Soviet bottom line is different from ours." And if Hussein was per- mitted to withdraw-as the Soviets proposed-without having to face con- tinued economic and military sanc- tions, one of the levers for forcing him from office would be removed. (In an appearance at a military base in early February, a pumped-up Bush said, "And when we win. . . we will have taught a dangerous dictator... that what we say goes.") One reason the President and other officials remained so polite about the Soviet V nion's ef- forts is that its coöperation will be needed in the postwar period, especially as the V.N. considers continued sanc- tions, or other long-term arrange- ments. Still, most officials were miffed that the Soviets had got into the act at all-not to mention that they didn't tell us beforehand about their proposal- since the upshot might have been some- thing that got in the way of the Ad- ministration's determination to prose- cute the war to the point where Saddam Hussein would be left with few troops and weapons, and have to comply with all the V.N. resolutions. In the words of one allied diplomat, "The problem was how you say no without looking like you don't want a peaceful resol u- tion." Therefore, Baker sent a long letter to his Soviet counterpart, Alek- sandr Bessmertnykh, suggesting re- visions in the proposal-including a four-day withdrawal timetable, a re- quirement that the weapons be left be- hind, and observance of all the V.N. resolutIons. Almost no one expected Saddam Hussein to accept this. When, last Thursday, the Soviets came forth with yet another proposal- one that called for wIthdrawal "within a fixed time frame, " to be specified later, and still called for a lifting of the other V.N. resolutions-the Adminis- tration and its major allies decided that it was time to get hold of the process by setting their own terms. Since they were planning to launch the ground war, they couldn't walt around while Iraq dickered over withdrawal terms, and they needed to regain control. Ideas